Founder
Why I built Trellis
I am a florist. Anita, my wife, is our designer. We run a flower shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Trellis is the software that runs it. Every order that comes through our door goes through Trellis first.
I never planned to write software. I planned to sell flowers. When we opened, I signed up with a platform that was new at the time, and I was glad to have found it. One of the founders helped me get going himself. Ask around and a lot of florists will tell you he was the heart of that company. Then he left, and it stopped being the company he had built.
I stayed on for years. The screens did not improve much. I wanted to put alt text on my own photographs, the way any website lets you, so I asked, and kept asking, and heard “next week” for a month and a half before I was told it could not be done. Search was an About page and nothing else. The neighborhood pages and blogs they generated for me were the same ones every other shop got, and Google treated them that way. I once spent three hours on the phone to change a background color. An update put it back.
When we moved across the country, our old city, Torrance, California, was still written into our pages, and it stayed there for years.
I am not telling you this to complain. I am telling you because it is where I found out what a florist actually needs from software, and the list is short.
The counter, the phone and the website should land on one list. Whoever is at the bench should see the day in the order it leaves. The driver should have the shop in their pocket. A photo at the door should settle the question of whether the flowers arrived. A florist should be able to write the alt text on every picture and do today's SEO, not last decade's, without asking anyone. A new person should be able to take an order on their first morning. And the software should stay out of the way.
Hold the shop up, the way a trellis holds a climbing rose, and let it grow.
So Anita and I built it. We built it for our own shop, and our shop has run on it since April 2026. Every screen had to survive a real morning: a wedding week, a printer that jammed at nine, a driver waiting for a route, a Mother's Day. If it did not survive the shop, it did not ship. It is still refined every day against real life, because we are still in the shop every day.
Trellis is one system that brings everything together, and you do not have to learn it to use it. Orders, the workroom, deliveries, the cash register, the website and its SEO, proposals for weddings and events, subscriptions, the newsletter, the books. Your customers are yours. Your data is yours. You run the store the way you want to.
If you run a flower shop and you want a better system, I would like to show you ours. Write to me. We will walk through one day in Trellis, on the screens you would use.
Bela Gazdag
Trellis Enterprises
info@trellisenterprises.com